web server deprecation notice
I like making many small, independent projects that continue to work indefinitely, and projects involving a backend are the antithesis of this.
I currently have a 7-year-old express.js server running on a Windows mini PC at my parents’ house. Originally made for Elimination, its scope has expanded as I reused the infrastructure for various other projects that needed a backend, and now it uses 3–4 different databases and is a pain to debug whenever the server doesn’t start.
I plan on winding down this server to rewrite it and switch the mini PC to Linux, and I’m only planning on migrating a fraction of the original’s functionality. Therefore, this serves as a landing page for any features on my websites that rely on this web server. Fortunately, the list is small, and these projects probably aren’t being used by anyone anymore.
UGWA
UGWA was already deprecated in the fall of 2021. It has three features that use my web server.
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Interstudent communication. The chatroom will be turned into a public, static archive.
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Assync. The feature will be disabled, and you will not be able to export your data.
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Usage tracking. It seems like I disabled this feature a while ago, but I may publish the data (users per hour) in the future.
Elimination
Elimination was only used for a few months before Covid began in March 2020. It was designed to support other user-created games as a full replacement for the assassination website that predated it, but I suspect it hasn’t seen much usage outside of the Gunn 2020 game it was made for.
- Login/signup will be disabled and will link to this page.
- I will restore the home page button that linked directly to the Gunn game, which remains in a frozen state after it was paused indefinitely during Covid.
- The entire website will reflect a static archive of already-public user and game data.
Yearbook signing
Yearbook signing was a virtual replacement for me drawing sheep in yearbooks. Before Covid, I’d draw a sheep and assign them a number based on the number of sheep I’ve drawn for yearbooks so far.
The number will be fixed to the last value of the counter.1
Unaffected pages
I plan on migrating the following services to the new web server, so these won’t be affected:
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AS Finance Calendar is a stateless wrapper around A.S. Finance’s “List Funded” website, and it seems to still recieve human usage.
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free food events at ucsd is a proxy for the MongoDB Atlas database that stores the scraped free food events. Even if I decide to stop scraping Instagram for free food events (since I personally no longer need them), the website will remain up as an archive of past events.
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notes will remain since I still use it.
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I believe someone spammed the endpoint a few years ago, so now it’s in the ten thousands. ↩